DOWNHILL FROM HERE, Brooklyn amputee, victim of a 1992 shooting, striving to make the Paralympic Alpine ski team
October 16, 2005
by John Jeansonne, Staff Correspondent ©Newsday Inc.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The bullet shattered Ralph Green's pelvis, ricocheted into his intestines, tore away a portion of his colon, burst his bowel into his abdomen and severed a branch of his aorta. It necessitated 28 surgical procedures, including successive amputations that eventually took away Green's left leg clear up to his hip.
The bullet, Green said, "is nothing I'd want to sit on my fireplace." It came from a .38 revolver, fired into Green's back by a stranger on a Brooklyn street for no discernible reason on an August evening in 1992. Green was 15 then, weeks away from his sophomore season as the starting quarterback for the varsity football team at Boys & Girls High School.
The bullet "definitely changed my life," he said, yet in ways that are no more logical than the shooting itself. At 28, Green not only remains an athlete but a world-class athlete at that, in the unlikely endeavor of disabled Alpine skiing, and is the first black man on that sport's national team.
From a dark, rainy, violent night in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he has come to a Rocky Mountain High: He lives in Vail, trains nearby, loves snow and wants to settle in the mountains for good.
Ski officials expect he will compete on the U.S. team at the Paralympic Games in Turin, Italy, in March.
"If I hadn't been shot, I'd have been in a totally different reality now," he said, emphasizing bright sides and silver linings. If he had not been shot, he would not be "traveling around the world," which he describes as "awesome." He likely never would have wandered far from Bed-Stuy, never would have seen most of Europe, New Zealand, Chile, Canada. He would not have gotten to "experience different cultures and meet different people."
As an elite athlete in disabled sports, he has acquired a handful of sponsorship deals: Cox Communications, Coca-Cola, Subaru, The Home Depot. He does public speaking, mostly to children and teenagers, preaching a never-give-up outlook and "enlightening kids about disabled people."
Certainly, Green's story is enlightening, from near death - he lost five liters of blood the night he was shot and remained in a coma for two of the nine months he was hospitalized - into a dance out of the graveyard. He is illustrative of the healing mission, physical and otherwise, of the Paralympics, the "Parallel Olympics" for the world's disabled and handicapped athletes.
The Paralympics has its roots in World War II, when a German- born neurosurgeon named Ludwig Guttmann introduced sport as a form of rehabilitation at his English hospital, where he was charged with treating scores of veterans who had lost limbs and suffered spinal- cord injuries.
Guttmann organized a wheelchair competition positioned to coincide with the 1948 London Olympics, and from his Games evolved the Paralympics, which now includes events in different classes for athletes with birth defects affecting their limbs, dwarfism, blindness, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injuries and neurological conditions that affect mobility. The whole idea is to emphasize athletic achievement rather than disability.
Green's current Alpine teammates offer proof of the possibilities: Chris Devlin-Young, 43, paralyzed in a plane crash on a Coast Guard mission; Sandy Dukat, 33, born without a right femur, causing her right foot to be amputated at 4; Laurie Stephens, 21, born with spina bifida; Lacey Heward, 25, who's used a wheelchair since she was 16 months old after a large weight fell on her, pinching her spine.
And now, with casualties streaming back from the war, the U.S. Olympic Committee has set up special training camps to introduce wounded veterans to the possibility of an active life through disabled sports. Thirty-four injured soldiers attended such a session here last month, candidates for the kind of journey that confronted 15-year-old Ralph Green, about the most athletic thing on two legs at the time.
Before he was shot, he "could dunk a basketball at 14. Not to blow my own horn," he said with his toothy smile, "but when I compare myself in football, Michael Vick comes to mind." He played baseball and tennis, had begun to dabble in track and field.
The second of five children, he was known at home as "Putt- putt," because "my dad had an old putt-putt car, and when he'd come home, I'd always rush to the window."
He always was surrounded, he said, "by a big family" and school chums. (It was an elementary school friend who had to tell Green his leg had been amputated, he said: "My mom couldn't tell me.")
There were times of anger, he admitted, and frustration. His first introduction to disabled sports was with Long Island-based Aspire, which placed him in track and field events and took him to the Poconos a year after he left the hospital to try skiing, which he immediately dismissed.
It wasn't until 2000, eight years after he was shot, that "skiing clicked in my head." His explanation of why seems vague even to himself. "I had gone to LIU [where he studied physical therapy, then social work] and had come to a point in my life where I was lost," he said.
He moved to Winter Park, Colo., site of the National Sports Center for the Disabled, determined to master the sport. Kevin Jardine, coach of the disabled Alpine team, was struck by Green's relentless training effort and innate athleticism. He is 6 feet, 180 pounds, "and I can still throw a tight spiral 50 yards," Green said.
"Skiing was something different. I guess I decided that by skiing, I would shock the world. I'm from the projects, born and raised. I was what we call 'ghetto fabulous'; I was a leader in the community. I wanted to defy expectations by doing something different."
So he borrowed outriggers, poles with small skis used by the disabled, "clicked into a ski" and headed down the mountain. "The first time was a disaster," he said. "It took me an hour and a half to get down the hill, but I knew I'd made the coaches proud. At first, it was cold and wet, but when I clicked into skiing, it was a feeling of freedom. And one of the benefits I had was I'd never skied. When I came into the sport I didn't take anything for granted."
By then, Green had gotten rid of his prosthetic leg. "At some point in life, you want to be free," he said. "It slowed me down."
Because he has what he called hip disarticulation - "I don't have a thigh or a 'stump' " - devices to fit him are expensive, from $50,000 to $70,000. Green decided he "wasn't afraid to be different" and be seen with only one leg, walking with a lightweight crutch.
"Losing a leg is not something I enjoyed going through," he said, "but it's something I made the best of."
On skis, "my favorite thing is zooming past an able-bodied person. And, when I'm racing, it's that feeling at the top, building up, getting ready to start. And, at the finish, I look back up and say, 'I just had some fun!' "
Green has had more than fun, with two top-10 finishes in World Cup events last year. He has been ranked as high as No. 12 in some world rankings.
The full acceptance of Green's situation - the normality of life on one leg - seemed to be borne out when he was asked if his mother ever has seen him ski. "Last year," he said, "for the first time."
And her reaction to witnessing a disabled competition, with her son showing off on the slopes? "To see a blind person and a paralyzed person skiing," he said, shaking his head, "was the most amazing thing to her."
As for the bullet and the young man who fired it in 1992, Green said, "I don't know why I was shot. I still don't.
"But growing up and living life to its fullest, you learn to be forgetful. There are six billion souls on Earth; everybody's not perfect. I'm not one to judge him. I'm just happy I'm still alive. When I woke up out of a coma, when you come to reality, I still had a family that never let me down. I'm still 'Putt-putt.' To them, I'm not 'The Gimp' or anything like that.
"When you're hospitalized for eight, nine months, you get a different outlook on life. That's an eye-opener . . . My mom, my sisters, my family were there, always supportive of me."
And he remains ghetto fabulous, unique in his neighborhood. "I go back to New York every few months," Green said. "The other day, an old friend said, 'Hey, man, you still ice skating in Alaska?'"
